Engagement

– This article is adapted from an article written by Sal Khan (Khan Academy) Researchers have known for some time that the brain is like a muscle; that the more you use it, the more it grows. They’ve found that neural connections form and deepen most when we make mistakes doing difficult tasks rather than repeatedly having success with easy ones. What this means is that our intelligence is not fixed and the best way that we can grow our intelligence is to embrace tasks where we might struggle and fail. Dr. Carol Dweck of Stanford University has been studying people’s mindsets towards learning for decades. She has found that most people adhere to one of two mindsets: fixed or…

Student misbehaviour can certainly sabotage our teaching and increase our stress level. Students are far more likely to misbehave when they don’t see the relevance of the school work they are being asked to do. Some of the most common questions older students ask are, “Why are we doing this?”, “Why are we learning this?”, “How am I going to use this in my life?” and “What’s the point of doing this?” It’s tempting for a busy teacher to brush off these types of questions. But they are questions that are worth taking the time to answer. Explaining why you have planned a particular activity and making it relevant to the students helps to engage them. These explanations help make…

Educators have long been aware of self-fulfilling prophecies. Recent research on brain activity from Dr Tali Sharot’s book ‘The Optimism Bias’, clearly illustrates why our expectations of our students are so important. The problem with pessimistic expectations, such as those of the clinically depressed, is that they have the power to alter the future; negative expectations shape outcomes in a negative way. How do expectations change reality? To answer this question my colleague, cognitive neuroscientist Sara Bengtsson, devised an experiment in which she manipulated positive and negative expectations of students while their brains were scanned and tested their performance on cognitive tasks. To induce expectations of success, she primed college students with words such as smart, intelligent and clever just…